April 16th, The Day It Happened
1pm- I leave my house and walk to the library for my TTRPG club meeting.
4pm- After my meeting, I walk back from the library and go sit on the field with my friends and read ‘Geek Love’ by Kathrine Dunn for class.
5pm- I go back to my apartment to get ready for class, change my clothes and put on makeup.
6pm- Faye and I walk to class together.
7:55pm- Sam leaves class to go to the COM building. There’s a deep anxiety in my gut as she leaves and as storm clouds roll in across the sky.
8pm- Oh god what is going on- the sky is bleeding and there’s glass in my arm and I am bleeding and the world is bleeding.
8:15pm- We left the class and ran to the field. There’s already a ton of people there, some just staring at the sky with a discomforting revelry. People who had been at the trade blanket a few hours before started helping people who are injured. I get a piece of cloth tied around my arm.
8:30pm- God- or something close to it is roaring from the forests. I leave to get my roommate’s cat from the apartment with Colin, Jordan and Faye.
8:45pm- I fill a garbage bag with a blanket, bandaids, water, any dry food I can find, then return to the field.
9pm- I try to find my roommates and give the cat back to [redacted]
10pm- With whatever friends I can find, I wait on the field until any earthquakes have stopped.
12pm- Regardless of RAD’s advice, I go back into my apartment with as many of my friends as I can fit and we try to figure out what is happening.
2am- When we hear talk of going into the fog, I leave to go to bed. I don’t fuck with fog and I certainly don’t want to see what happens to the people who are going to walk into it.
April 17th-23
April 19th, 2025
I don’t usually bother with diaries. Or writing about my own life at all, really. The closest I’ve ever gotten is voice memos and random thoughts frantically typed out in my notes app. But that’s not an option anymore. Ever since… the thing, my phone’s been barely functional. And, even if it was, we’ve been warned to use the power we do have sparingly. None of us have service or any means of contact to the outside world, so there isn’t much point in trying to keep my phone operational. So, instead, I’ve been writing everything down on physical paper. It’s actually kind of nice, but it’s also been giving my hand cramps all day, which has been nothing if not annoying.
Things on campus continue to keep moving forward- RAD has been trying for the past few days to get some kind of organization going, and some people are listening, but they can only do so much when the administration they’re supposed to report to is gone. Billy and a bunch of other CCTV members have started going around and collecting any extra food people have and making a stock pile in the HCC. I don’t know how many people are on campus at the moment, but from Billy’s estimates, there’s probably a few hundred who have been coming in and out of the HCC- mostly residents and members of CCTV. I’ve been stuck to my friends like glue, though that seems to be a pretty common sentiment within the community. I never thought I wouldn’t feel safe sleeping alone, but the idea of that has become terrifying within the past 72 hours.
Everyone’s been doing whatever they can to help, even with all of us holed up on campus. Our main work has been moving any food that wasn’t pillaged from the POD over the Greenery. Some of it spoiled in the first few days when the POD lost power, but the stuff that can still be salvaged should be able to last us a little while. It’s hard to say, really, with how many mouths we have to feed. What we have could last us anywhere from a month to just a few days.
I feel uneasy about having the only food source be in the Greenery, if I’m being honest. It’s not that I don’t trust people not to take more than they need… but I don’t trust people not to take more than they need. The group that settled in the upper campus has much better access than we do and I worry that no one will be there to make sure that whatever we have to ration gets shared equally.
I’ve been half tempted to bring it up to Billy, to ask him to be the voice for the residents, but he’s got so much on his plate already. CCTV’s doing their best to help, but there’s so many people and such little supplies. Any practice they may have had organizing school events isn’t nearly helpful in the face of some fucked up apocolypse, but they keep trying. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea about Billy being their leader, too, since it seems like they go to him with every issue. I mean, he seems happy to help out, but I worry it’ll put too much of a strain on him if we have to do this long term.
I’ll try to keep writing here as much as I can, in case these ramblings somehow become helpful, or even just as a place to put down my thoughts. God knows I need it right now.
April 24th-May 4th
April 28th (?), 2025
My birthday was a few days ago. I spent my 20th sorting dry goods in the HCC while my friends scavenged for any containers that we could repurpose to store water. I would complain that it was a lousy birthday, but I would be ignoring the current shithole that is everything else, so I won’t bother.
CCTV’s been busy trying to help everyone survive, and it’s definitely making an impact. Most people on lower campus have somewhere to sleep at night, and those who don’t at least have a couch to crash on. I can’t fault them for doing their best, but it’s also hard to ignore the fact that we’re running out of food. If we continue on like this, I don’t know how much longer we can keep everyone fed. I’ve been making the walk between upper and lower campus to check in with the group that’s holed up in the library basement. Arcades has been making some attempts at organizing, which seems to be going relatively well, and I’ve been helping drag couch cushions and other things to use as bedding down there for people to sleep on.
It’s weird, I never really bothered to try and connect with the people in Arcades before, but Birch has been doing a shockingly good job of organizing. It’s impressive, if not a little intimidating. They’ve been making more progress on food sourcing than most other people, and they’ve even been tentatively sending people to explore the forest, though they never make it very far before returning. I’ve been thinking of moving some of my stuff over there so I can be more helpful, but I don’t want to take up too much room. While I appreciate all the work CCTV is doing, at the moment it seems like Arcades is better at getting prepared for the long run, which feels much more pressing at the moment. I don’t know how the groups who have been trying to get through the fog have been doing, but I’m too scared to ask.
I’ve already heard the rumors, seen what remains of the people who wander back out. They’re not themselves anymore; Most are just quiet, but the worst are the ones who talk. They’ve seen things- people out there, in the mist, or at least what remains of them. Vague figures out of the corner of their eyes, voices calling for them that aren’t really there- for someone who loves horror so much, this all freaks me out way more than it should.
I miss my mom. I mean, I miss my other family too, but I miss her a lot. I was supposed to spend my birthday with her. We were going to go out to dinner and she promised not to talk about school at all and it was supposed to be a nice night. But I didn’t get to do that. It feels selfish to mourn over such a simple loss, but simple losses seem to be just about the only thing I can mourn at the moment. Everything in my life has shifted so rapidly, it’s hard to miss anything except for the little things that I took for granted. Ugh..
Here’s to hoping that someone- anyone finds us soon.
I don’t know how much longer I can take.
May 5th-May 15th
May 10th (I think), 2025:
I am right about everything all the time. For YEARS, I have been saying that all deers are evil, and now, would you look at that, one of the animals that has become most dangerous; The Deer. Now listen, I don’t hate deer, in fact, they’re one of my favorite animals, but they are absolutely creatures with evil in their hearts and no one should ever trust them. Bambi was just an attempt by the deer loving deep state (Disney) to convince the masses that deer are something other than the deeply evil creatures that they are.
I think I’m going insane. I have too much time to think.
In other news, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the bears. Any time that I’m not helping out with Arcades, I’ve been sitting out towards what used to be the soccer fields and just sitting with them. They’re oddly peaceful for such large creatures. Ever since the deer ran them out of the forest, they’ve become eerily docile. Not enough where you could give them a nice scratch behind the ears, but enough where you could have a nice one way conversation with them and not have them skitter back into the woods. Talking to them is much nicer than talking to most people.
It’s not like I don’t like helping out with Arcades, but the more I do, the more people have begun to rely on me. It seems like half the time someone seeks me out, it’s because they need help with something, and while it is rewarding that people trust me and want my advice and assistance, I’m fucking exhausted. I’ve done basically all the work for our next expedition and every time I try to ask Birch to put someone else in charge of the project, they basically blow me off and say ‘Oh, but you’re so good and organizing this kind of thing’ and I want to punch them.
And, to top it off, there are random objects appearing in the woods now. As if we didn’t have enough insane shit on our plate. It’s not like any of this has made any sense, but things seem to keep devolving the longer we stay here. There is hope. I know that, because I’ve seen it in everyone here, but the longer we stay, the more it wanes.
I wonder more and more everyday, if there is a god, did they abdon us? Or is this just a test? Or is there no god at all? Maybe this is all just the byproduct of a cold, unfeeling universe.
I understand ‘Lost’ a lot more now. No wonder people go crazy like this. I wish I had watched more of that show before this. Maybe it would have helped.
